How I Learned to Embrace My Brown Skin

The journey to self-love.

Looking at my reflection in the mirror, I see versions of my former selves. All of them riddled with low self-esteem and plagued by an inability to articulate why. It was confusing growing up in an era where talk of cultivating confidence was in high swing, all while systems were set in place to make you hate the way you look — especially if you were born black with kinky hair and dark skin. Self-love? To me, it’s always been an empty buzzword written about in a tone so distancing I couldn’t imagine having access to it. I spent the majority of my early years feeling invisible in a sea of white students.

I resented the intricately braided hairstyles that my mom took such care to make neat. I begged for a chemical straightener because I wanted straight hair down my back like the other girls in my class. As I got older, though, I began to see that all the perms in the world couldn’t separate me from my blackness. Being black — and experiences like walking through Scarsdale, a ritzy New York suburb, and having a lady clutch her purse when I passed by, or being followed around in department stores — wasn’t something I could disassoci­ate from.

A significant turning point came around ninth grade, when I got into feminism by way of riot grrrl, and the lack of diversity in the movement made me seek out other feminist narratives. Discovering Angela Davis, a revolutionary black rights activist and scholar who wore her hair in an iconic Afro, filled me with pride in being black. As I started to appreciate my skin, and my kinky hair, my self-esteem grew and my fears of inadequacy subsided. Self-love became more than a buzzword — it became an attitude. It’s also a continuous process. It’s looking in the mirror and saying, “While there’s always room for improvement, you are enough.”